Our Company News

April 25, 2018

Campanelli Signs First Tenant at 100 TECH as Pharma Fills 50,000 SF+

*Originally printed by Joe Clements for The Real Reporter

Campanelli’s latest makeover of an aging corporate office property into a modern multi-tenanted product is already bearing fruit, with company officials telling Real Reporter the former Reebok headquarters here has enticed a pharmaceutical company to fill 50,675 sf on the second and third floors of the six-story asset recast by its landlord as 100 TECH. The long-term deal represents more than 25 percent of the 188,000 sf building’s available space.

Collegium Pharmaceuticals will begin its move-in this summer, according to Campanelli Director of Leasing Peter Brown. The building is represented by exclusive leasing agents Michael Frisoli and Tyler McGrail from Newmark Knight Frank, while CBRE principals John Lashar and Steve Purpura advised the tenant, a fast-growing operation presently occupying barely 15,000 sf in neighboring Canton.

“We are thrilled to have signed our first lease with Collegium Pharmaceuticals, a leader in developing and commercializing innovative products for patients suffering from pain,” Brown relays while observing of the repositioning effort, “We have worked hard to create a dynamic, collaborative workplace that will help tenants like Collegium achieve compelling employee experiences and enhance their ability to recruit and retain top-quality employees.”

The approach, Brown explains, is similar to that Campanelli used earlier this decade buying and renovating a 516,000-sf North Quincy office campus renamed Heritage Landing. The vertically integrated company engaged its in-house design, construction and marketing skills to take a fundamentally solid building and equip it with upgraded materials and systems plus a smorgasbord of amenities deemed critical in the new millennium workplace, Brown recounts. The assets were later harvested for an aggregate price of $92 million. Meanwhile, Campanelli spirited down to Stoughton with partner Trigate in late 2016 to buy the fallow Reebok building at 100 Technology Center Dr. for a mere $9 million. Frisoli and McGrail are reprising their roles as leasing agents at Heritage Landing working alongside Brown.

“The Heritage Landing formula was refined and improved in many ways” at 100 TECH, Brown says. Greeted by “a strikingly redesigned” main entrance, the fitness center and locker rooms are of an even higher pedigree than the acclaimed Heritage facility offers—“country club quality,” he says—and it is part of a ground level complex that has a conference room, gaming section and cafeteria, with the dining area offering a chameleon-esque flexibility to host evolving dining options. Campanelli, for example, is bringing the urban FOODA dining service to the building, with the cafeteria set against a dramatic two-story glass curtain wall. FOODA adapts to the desires of its clients, Brown says, adding he thinks it could be the company’s inaugural foray outside downtown.

Although constructed for one company, 100 TECH breaks up well as a multi-tenanted facility, Brown reports, the center-core design one reason and its “Cadillac” ventilation system is a further bonus providing extra capacity evenly dispensed. “All of the bare bones of the infrastructure were of a very high quality, and what we did was basically bring it up to speed with the kinds of amenities we know are so critical to companies offering their workers today,” says Brown. The results: besides the first actual signing, 100 TECH has seen upwards of 600,000 sf in requirements explore the new alternative, and Brown says he is encouraged by the “direction” some of those discussions are leading to, further details of which he could not provide.

“The leasing guys are doing really well—we have had a good amount of traffic and strong interest from some promising medium- to large-scale companies, and a lot of that was during construction,” Brown conveys. “The feedback has been all positive.”

Campanelli partner and Director of Acquisitions Steve Murphy also expresses confidence in the Collegium commitment, said to be in excess of seven years, will not be an isolated situation. “This property is unique in that it offers the flexibility to lease between 2,500 and 138,000 square feet of contiguous office space in a corporate setting in the Route 128 South market,” Murphy outlines in a statement. “Our goal was to create a best-in-class space, offering businesses a high quality of infrastructure and a complex of exceptional amenities that can’t be found elsewhere in this market,” Murphy says, “and we are confident that we have delivered on that promise.”

One trend expected to help Route 128 South landlords are continued rent hikes in the Route 128 Central submarket where average asking rents of $36.80 per sf are nearly $10 higher than that for the southern flank ($25.24 per sf), as detailed in the Q1 2018 NKF office report. Migrating companies are typically looking for a discounted rent while retaining a high-quality space, notes NKF, something 100 TECH would appear to offer. “All of the companies we see go through here agree it is the best thing you will find on the South Shore,” Brown says. “We feel very good about where we are right now.”

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Once again, Campanelli has successfully identified the business needs of its tenants and provided them with greater amenities and high quality services.